1. Field of the Invention
Methods and apparatuses consistent with the present invention relate to a method and apparatus for removing motion blur in an image. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and method for removing motion blur in an image, which can estimate a motion-blur function corresponding to the motion, and remove the motion blur using the estimated motion-blur function.
2. Description of the Related Art
When a user obtains an image using a device with image-capturing hardware and software, such as a digital camera, the quality of the image is often deteriorated by motion blur generated shaking of the user's hand or the movement of the subject.
Technologies that can be used to prevent the shaking includes: an optical image stabilizer (OIS), an electrical image stabilizer (EIS), and a digital image stabilizer (DIS). The OIS, which is applied in most existing digital cameras, uses an active prism method, lens-shift method, or sensor-movement method.
Because this technology uses a gyro sensor for sensing the shaking, an optical system and a driving system, the structure of the body tube is complicated, and the size of the camera module is increased as a result.
Further, there are several ways to remove the motion blur generated in the obtained image, including a method based on the regular pattern of zeros in the frequency area, and other methods based on the stochastic linear model. These methods can be only applied to the linear motion blur (the case where the sizes and directions of the motion blurs are the same throughout the whole image). Hence, it cannot be estimated that the movement direction and the size of the subject is the same throughout the whole image when obtaining the image of a subject using a digital camera, and it is thus difficult to accurately estimate the motion blur function corresponding to the motion blur.
Korean Unexamined Patent 2001-0037829 discloses an image-processing system, which sets a multiple-channel-type addition function using time and space information, adaptively sets the adding value according to each pixel of a high-resolution image, reduces the calculation times by repetition, and adaptively selects normalization parameters according to pixels, in order to obtain the high-resolution image using the bilinear-interpolated image of a low-resolution image, but it is difficult to accurately estimate the motion-blur function corresponding to the motion blur when the movement direction and the size of the subject are not the same throughout the whole image, which is a problem.